May 18, 2010

5 Best PHP Frameworks

Posted in PHP by admin

Today’s web developer must be well-equipped in order to fully harness the enormous horsepower and features at his disposal, not to mention satisfy the tastes of an increasingly finicky user. Because these challenges are universally faced among the web development community, several projects known as frameworks have gained a considerable following thanks to their ability to abstract away commonplace tasks such as data validation and database and web services integration, not to mention SEO, template management, and a testing.

In this article, I’ll introduce you to five frameworks that are transforming the way today’s PHP developers go about building web sites. If you haven’t yet explored framework-based development, I invite you to use this list as a starting point for learning more about what’s possible. Rather than simply list the five frameworks that have managed to gain the most mindshare amongst the PHP community, I instead try to highlight at least one feature that differentiates each framework from the other solutions.

CodeIgniter:

CodeIgniter is a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications. If you’re a developer who lives in the real world of shared hosting accounts and clients with deadlines, and if you’re tired of ponderously large and thoroughly undocumented frameworks.

Of the five frameworks introduced in this article, none hails from a more interesting background than CodeIgniter. With the first version dubbed “pMachine” back in 2001 by creator Rick Ellis, the software was first put to use powering none other than Nancy Sinatra’s web site. Subsequently redubbed CodeIgniter in 2006, the framework is now used as the foundation for the popular ExpressionEngine content management system.

Cake PHP

In many ways, CakePHP acted as the trailblazer for modern framework development within the PHP community, with the project founded back in 2005 on the heels of Ruby on Rails. In fact, having borrowed many of Rails’ most compelling features, CakePHP is often erroneously referred to as “Rails for PHP,” despite the project having long since taken on a life of its own.

One of CakePHP’s most powerful advantages is a lively community who actively contribute not only tutorials, components, and other features through the Bakery, but also open source CakePHP-based projects through the Cake Forge, which as of this date hosts more than 240 open source applications. Sporting an impressive portfolio of deployments, among them The Miss Universe Pageant, MIT’s Scratch Program, and The Mozilla Foundation’s enormous Firefox Add-ons site, CakePHP is clearly worth considering no matter how ambitious your project may be.

The Zend Framework

Like all of the frameworks discussed in this article, the Zend Framework is packed with the standard features one would expect in a framework, such as data validation, database integration, and user authentication. However, this particular solution is unique in that it places the most emphasis on facilitating connectivity with a wide variety of web services, among them the Amazon Web Services API, Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services, Twitter, Windows Azure and Yahoo.

Further, the Zend Framework enjoys the backing of a particularly large corporate namesake sponsor, namely Zend Technologies. While the development process is no less open than other community-driven framework projects, this relationship does afford the Zend Framework project some additional benefits thanks to Zend Technologies’ corporate resources and partnerships with companies such as Microsoft, who recently contributed a Windows Azure component to the project. Another interesting recent development was the collaboration with Deutsche Telekom to produce the Developer Garden component, which gives developers the ability to use the Deutsche Telekom network to perform telephony tasks such as sending SMS messages and establishing voice-based calls.

Symfony

Along with CakePHP Symfony is one of the PHP community’s elder framework projects, having been founded by an enterprising French developer named Fabien Potencier back in October 2005. These days, it powers thousands of web sites around the globe, including the enormous Delicious social bookmarking application.

Symfony’s particular strength lies in the project management team’s incredibly well-organized support initiatives, led by the project’s corporate foster Sensio Labs. In addition to an annual conference, Sensio offers regular training sessions, and a series of open source books. Coupled with an abundance of documentation and a community that has contributed thousands of plugins, Symfony users won’t be left wanting in terms of understanding and extending this framework.

Prado

Prado is a component-based and event-driven framework for rapid Web programming in PHP 5. Prado reconceptualizes Web application development in terms of components, events and properties instead of procedures, URLs and query parameters.

A Prado component is a combination of a specification file (in XML), an HTML template and a PHP class. Prado components are combined together to form larger components or complete Prado pages. Developing Prado Web applications mainly involves instantiating prebuilt and application-specific component types, configuring them by setting their properties, responding to their events by writing handler functions, and composing them into application tasks.

Prado provides the following benefits for Web application developers:

reusability – Codes following the Prado component protocol are highly reusable. Everything in Prado is a reusable component.
ease of use – Creating and using components are extremely easy. Usually they simply involve configuring component properties.
robustness – Prado frees developers from writing boring, buggy code. They code in terms of objects, methods and properties, instead of URLs and query parameters. The latest PHP5 exception mechanism is exploited that enables line-precise error reporting.
performance – Prado uses a cache technique to ensure the performance of applications based on it. The performance is in fact comparable to those based on commonly used template engines.
team integration – Prado enables separation of content and presentation. Components, typically pages, have their content (logic) and presentation stored in different files.

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5 Comments to “5 Best PHP Frameworks”

May 18, 2010 at 5:39 pm
webaxes says:

very informative dude keep it up

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May 27, 2010 at 6:02 pm
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January 17, 2011 at 9:01 pm
Sol Castruita says:

This post seems to recieve a large ammount of visitors. How do you promote it? It gives a nice individual twist on things. I guess having something authentic or substantial to post about is the most important factor.

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February 22, 2011 at 3:13 pm
Stas says:

For all frameworks i recommend to use free PHP IDE Codelobster PHP Edition (http://www.codelobster.com) with special plug-ins for installation, autocomplete, context help and etc.

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February 27, 2011 at 3:19 pm
5 Best PHP Frameworks | BlogiNum | Velocity Software Solutions (P) Ltd. says:

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5 Best PHP Frameworks

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